What happened next, however, was telling: the Australian measure was passed – and Google and Facebook did indeed pay and reimburse Australian news companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. The Down Under news experiment has prompted lawmakers around the world to adopt its own — an EU directive that has Google forging similar agreements, most recently with France — a momentum that proponents say is making Google and Facebook nervous.
“Google and Facebook don’t want to set a precedent in which they have to pay for content,” said Mike Davis, director of the Internet Accountability Project, a conservative think tank that has joined liberals in Washington in pushing for antitrust reforms that use the Big Tech. “These are little potatoes to them — it’s a few billion dollars, right? But it’s life or death for the newspaper in your hometown.”
The architects of the JCPA are motivated by a single, fiery accusation: Google and Facebook are “free-riding” the news. It is this piggybacking, proponents argue, that perhaps more than any other factor has driven journalism to financial collapse.
In the decade or so after the Great Recession, the blame for the decline of newsrooms was broadly blamed on “the Internet” — and like encyclopedias, traditional journalism was criticized for failing to adapt to technological change.
But towards the end of the 2010s, a new argument emerged from media scientists and economists: Google and Facebook were the real culprits. In addition to a comprehensive White Paper from the News Media Alliance, influential antitrust thinker Matt Stoller could be where this school’s clearest statement comes from. A confluence of factors, Stoller argues, disguised what really caused the collapse of journalism.
The argument makes three basic points. First, news is extremely valuable to Google and Facebook: the snippets, links, and news snippets they display keep users engaged with a stream of new content. In the social media factory that sells your engagement to advertisers, the news has become an essential “commodity input” – what wood is to housing, or steel is to shipbuilding – to use the metaphor of Microsoft president Brad Smith, one of the largest donors of the concept of collective bargaining.
Second, unlike other types of content such as music and video streaming, terrestrial radio stations and cinema chains where platforms pay creators for the economic value their creations provide, Google and Facebook don’t pay to host news. (It doesn’t, thanks to a pivotal copyright decision that favored Google in 2007.) “We would never expect a platform to stream movies without paying a movie’s creators,” JCPA’s title sponsor, David Cicilline, Representative David Cicilline in the Second Room, said in August. Google and Facebook, he added, “use news content to enrich their platforms, but never pay for the labor and investment needed to report the news.” (Disclosure: Last summer, I did an internship on the House Antitrust Subcommittee, chaired by Cicilline.)
Third, JCPA’s proponents emphasize that news publishers are fundamentally hostile competitors to Google and Facebook. While the two tribes are highly symbiotic (note the “Share” button next to this article), they’re also essentially competing for the same resource — your time — which they must sell to the same limited group of advertisers. In the 2010s, just as Google and Facebook were devouring a huge chunk of the world’s ad revenue, news publishers began to crumble their ad revenue.
